


Travelling Companions

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: does the walker choose the path [4]
Category: Old Kingdom - Garth Nix, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Charter Magic, Developing Relationship, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Grief/Mourning, Oh No There's Only One Bed Whatever Shall We Do, Road Trip, old kingdom - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-16
Updated: 2020-02-16
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:20:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22757656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: After the defeat of Orson Krennic, Jyn and Cassian make their way north in search of the Lady Leia and her mysterious clansman companion.
Relationships: Cassian Andor/Jyn Erso
Series: does the walker choose the path [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1035293
Comments: 18
Kudos: 62





	Travelling Companions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [incognitajones](https://archiveofourown.org/users/incognitajones/gifts).



> For incognitajones in the 12 fandoms of Christmas!

Somehow it was not crossing the Wall that was strange, nor even returning to Abhorsen's House. Cassian was briefly startled when the sendings carried on as if Jyn were a queen, but Jyn's face set pale and cold and she went round touching each moonstone hand as quickly as if she thought they would burn her, and he rapidly became too worried about her to dwell much on how odd the whole experience had been. Afterwards she turned to Cassian like she wanted to cling to him, and he’d tried to ask if she was all right – but then Mogget made several smart remarks, and when Jyn had finished throwing her boots at the cat she insisted on behaving as if everything was normal. It was not normal, of course. Jyn was the Abhorsen, and Cassian had been automatically assigned a bedroom much nicer than the one he had originally been put up in, and a Free Magic denizen was making innuendos about his love life. But it was within the parameters of the last month and a half. 

What was _truly_ strange, so strange he couldn’t ignore it, was the Kingdom’s reaction to Jyn when they left the House and travelled north. Cassian hadn’t fully understood quite how desperate his fellow countrymen were for hope.

They were on a deadline; Baze and Chirrut had said they needed to be at the Bridge in a matter of weeks. Cassian kept thinking guiltily about Draven, no doubt fulminating at the Clayr's Glacier: he’d sent his former commander a brief note by message hawk from the House, acquainting him with events on the other side of the Wall, and the death of Galen Erso, but no reply had reached Cassian. He half expected that when they reached Glacier Draven would try to arrest him, and Jyn would threaten to kill Draven. And mean every word. Still, Cassian was less worried about that than getting Jyn to the Glacier in the first place. Thus far they had made three more stops than planned, all of them extended by the frantic pleas for assistance from local people who looked at Jyn and saw their best chance of survival.

Trusting to the late-afternoon darkness and irregularly flickering torches to mask his unprofessional expression, Cassian looked sideways at the Abhorsen, quietly receiving the greetings of another small town clinging to any certainty. She seemed taller and straighter than the sullen, suspicious girl he'd met at Wyverley; her face was both calmer and more opaque than it had been then, and her colouring had shifted perceptibly to the bone pallor and night black of the Abhorsens’ - helped, today, by the rain plastering it to her skull. In some ways she was sadder - Cassian had been on the receiving end of a few extremely rough hugs when Jyn suddenly and painfully remembered her fathers' deaths - but a burden had been lifted from her shoulders, too, in the sense that she'd been shown a path and a purpose and allowed to pick it up. He didn't know how he could ever have doubted her as Abhorsen-in-Waiting.

Cassian was sure there had been a time when his breath didn't stop at inconvenient intervals just because he happened to see her, too, but he had forgotten when that was. 

Other people didn't seem similarly stunned to meet her, but they were... reassured, relieved, like this village headwoman, who was clasping Jyn's damp hands and bidding welcome the Abhorsen and her sworn swordsman. They hung on her every word like she was their only saviour. Their eyes skipped over him in his unmarked gethre armour - the sendings had laid it out with no surcoat, and his Regency-green surcoat would not fit over it - and watched her with a kind of hunger. For a new world and a safer country, Cassian thought. For a kingdom where they could set foot out of doors and not fear the Dead. And without a monarch, or a Wallmaker that wasn't corrupt, all their desperate wishes for the future hung on Jyn. The weight of their gazes was enough that Cassian would sometimes take up a station behind Jyn's chair wherever they were given space to eat and sleep, just to try to distract some of those hungry eyes.

He wasn't sure how much success he was going to have here. He recognised the town, Asterspring. It had been founded on a very healthy natural wellspring, which was why it could afford to be so far from the Ratterlin or any of its tributaries, but it was still vulnerable compared to the river towns, and every menacing diminution in the groundwater resulted in panicked pleas to the Regent for more protection against the Dead. The last year's problems with the Regency - and the news of the death of the previous Abhorsen, if it had spread this far - had probably sent them into a fever pitch of anxiety. Now Jyn was here to relieve it, however temporarily, they would cling to her like climbing ivy.

The Paperwing had been landed outside Asterspring’s walls; they were barely twelve miles short of the Glacier, where they planned to leave the Paperwing and travel east to the Bridge, but the weather had grown too foul for them to continue. They would lose a day, but there was no sense in fretting about that now, and they were still short of Baze and Chirrut's deadline. The headwoman was asking, at flourishing, rhetorical length, if Jyn would replenish their wards and search their town for any Dead that might have crept in. Jyn and Cassian had quickly learned to expect such requests, and had thrashed out a course of action. Jyn went to deal with the wards, and Cassian moved the Paperwing to safety, found them rooms, and ordered dinner, keeping an ear out for Jyn yelling for help. 

So far she had not needed help. Saw Gerrera had taught Jyn to fight like he feared he would lose her as he'd lost Lyra, and with the sword her father had made her in one hand and a bell in the other Jyn was peerless. But peerless occasionally needed someone to stab a Dead Hand in the back all the same, and Cassian would be there when she called. 

People kept trying to talk to him when he was trying to listen for her, even though he knew that she was now tramping round the houses with a witchlight about her head and her sword out, well beyond the reach of a shout or even a scream that wasn't amplified by Charter magic. It was a nuisance. He smiled nicely and returned the polite replies they wanted from a dangerous and well-armed Charter mage in the company of the Abhorsen, and issued softly spoken commands that got them space in an rapidly emptied paddock for the Paperwing, healthy portions of a pie and roast vegetables slid quickly into the oven, and two beds in the house of the headwoman herself. Only one an actual bed, Cassian noted as he carried their things upstairs, but a pallet had been thoughtfully laid out for the sworn swordsman who would doubtless wish to sleep across the door to the Abhorsen's room. With a naked blade in hand, of course.

Well, it was a comfortable pallet as pallets went, and nobody had told the townsfolk that the sworn swordsman had recently bruised his spine and was under doctor's orders to sleep in a bed. On a mattress. Jyn would insist on the doctor's orders being followed, hopefully not so loudly that their hosts could hear her, but then it would do no good if she were to sleep badly either. 

They'd cross that bridge when they came to it, Cassian thought, suppressing the rush of blood to his cheeks and the back of his neck, and stepping out of the way while a bathtub was manhandled in and filled with the first of several cans of hot water.

Steady footsteps climbed the creaking wooden stairs, and Cassian looked around to see Jyn returning: quickly enough that there had been little trouble, but slowly enough that she had put a lot of work into the diminished wards. She smiled wearily at him, and he smiled automatically back, and then her eyes dropped to the pallet made up next to the wall, narrowed in irritation, and shot back to him. She opened her mouth, recriminations clearly at the ready - and in front of an interested maidservant with an empty can of water and a dawdling nature, too. 

“We'll talk about it when you've had a chance to bathe,” Cassian interrupted, and Jyn closed her mouth again.

“You first,” she said. “I promised Kelisa I'd look at the town's Charter stone for her. She's concerned it's not healthy.”

Healthy? Cassian wondered. How on earth could a Charter stone be unhealthy? They were either broken or whole and that was it. Charter preserve him, he understood why these people were nervous, but for them to continue badgering Jyn like this -

He cut that thought off. “I'll go,” he said. “You're tired.”

Jyn scrunched her face up at him, but didn't disagree. She unbuckled her bandolier and sword belt and laid them aside, and Cassian shepherded the maid out. He caught a glimpse of Jyn pulling the surcoat one-handed over her head, and bending her head to unbuckle the gethre coat, as the maidservant craned her neck to look back: Cassian reached out and closed the door firmly.

The nosy maid took the point.

“I’ve never seen an Abhorsen before,” she said, chattily, as a Cassian herded her down the stairs.

“They don't grow on trees,” Cassian said mildly, though he felt like telling her to mind her tongue. “All the worse for us.”

Maybe she'd heard something in his voice; she certainly looked at him like she was suddenly interested. “I know you're her sworn swordsman,” she said, “but -“

Cassian should have said something that would have depressed her pretensions. He should have been cool and unimpressed and a little amused, even, that she had leapt to so silly a conclusion.

Instead he said the first words that came into his mouth, which were “Mind your own business,” and which were obviously, painfully, exactly the wrong ones.

“Well I think it's _romantic_ ,” said the maid, and skipped away, no doubt to gossip. Cassian refrained from exacerbating his errors by banging his head against the nearest wall.

He cursed himself all the way to the Charter stone in the rain, and was so cold and formal that Kelisa wondered how the Abhorsen - who had a terrifying vocation, to be sure, and looked so ominous with that white skin and black hair, but smiled sweetly enough at the end of the day - could bear to be around him.

And yet, at dinner, somehow - for some reason - she smiled at him like he was necessary to her. 

Very odd.

Some time later, two floors up, Jyn looked at the bed and the pallet and Cassian.

“I'm not going to be responsible for you putting out your back,” she said firmly. “Not less than a week after crossing the Wall. Just wait until we catch up with Lady Leia, you can sleep on all the hard and stony floors you like then.”

It was no consolation to Cassian that Jyn had turned a faint and flattering watercolour pink about the cheeks, because he knew from the heat around his ears that he had turned very red. She folded her arms across her chest and set her chin.

“If you think it's all right,” he said, trying to be gentlemanly about this and hoping his voice wasn't stumbling obviously. “We can keep it quiet. Your reputation -“

“ _Fuck_ my reputation,” Jyn said savagely, and then looked quite surprised at herself. 

Curled up somewhere under the frame of the heavily cushioned, palatially blanketed, and (crucially) single bed, Mogget cackled. 


End file.
